Safe & Sustainable Foodware: Green Restaurants

Safe and Sustainable Foodware: Green Restaurants explores candid stories about what worked, what didn’t, and how they overcame barriers such as costs, customer preferences, and sourcing challenges.

The Safe and Sustainable Foodware webinar series equips restaurants, institutional food service providers, business associations, and community partners with the knowledge, tools, and resources to adopt reusable or certified-compostable food service products.  This session brings together experts with combined decades of experience in the food service industry to share practical strategies for reducing waste and improving sustainability in food business operations.

The series is funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) FY23-24 Pollution Prevention Grants: Environmental Justice Through Safer and More Sustainable Products, through the University of Illinois Chicago Institute for Environmental Science and Policy (IESP). Grant recipient work products may not have been formally reviewed by the EPA and may not reflect the views and policies of the EPA. The EPA does not endorse trade names or recommend the use of commercial products mentioned in these documents.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand real-world experiences of organizations that adopted sustainable foodware.
• Identify common barriers and strategies to overcome them.
• Gain insights into scaling pilot projects into ongoing practices.

Speakers:

• Kate Martini, Assistant Professor, Western Michigan University
• Kris Spaulding, Owner, Brewery Vivant
• Brittany Goode, Sustainability Manager, Aldea Coffee

Key Themes

Food businesses face unique challenges in sustainability, but also have the opportunity to lead industry and make a large impact on reducing food waste in landfills. By implementing systems-focused approaches and engaging staff, the businesses featured in this webinar see success in carbon reduction, operational efficiency, and pollution prevention. 

Designing Systems that Actually Work

Kate Martini of Western Michigan University has a systems-focused approach to waste management that draws on her background in organizational behavior management and experience as the former sustainability lead for Bell’s Brewery.  She emphasized that successful sustainability efforts depend on thoughtful system design. 

• Restaurants should plan for the full lifecycle of their materials. 
• Compostable products, for example, only deliver environmental benefits if they are actually composted. Without access to proper facilities, these items may end up in landfills, where they continue to generate greenhouse gas emissions.
• For this reason, Aldea Coffee has preferred recyclable plastic material when single-use items are required, as it is confident these can be processed locally. 

Sustainability decisions must also consider food quality.  Some menu items (e.g.: Brewery Vivant’s famous Duck Nachos) do not translate well to takeout, regardless of packaging. To package the dish in a way that would preserve its quality, each component would have to be individually packaged and assembled by the customer. In this case, limiting the takeout menu to items that preserve well can be the more sustainable chance than increasing packaging use.  

Aldea Coffee has several initiatives, but prioritizes reusable and refillable systems. The company even encourages customers to bring their own mugs and has introduced innovative options such as reusable clay cups.

The Importance of Infrastructure and Collaboration

Across all speakers, a consistent theme emerged: the success of sustainable foodware systems depends heavily on local infrastructure and partnerships. Waste audits, conversations with service providers, and engagement with municipalities are critical first steps for any business looking to improve its practices. 

Speakers also emphasized the importance of feedback loops, both internal and external. While customer feedback on foodware may be limited, visible sustainability efforts can strongly influence brand perception. Well-designed systems signal commitment and can enhance a business’s reputation, even without direct input.